Week Links 33-2013

With the final episode of Futurama broadcast this week there’s two week links in this roundup, as well as DreamWorks branching into Netflix territory, Sir Billi (hehe) and an Indiegogo campaign that looks quite promising.

M-Go, which is a joint venture between DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, is the latest in a group of digital video services that have launched over the last few years. Like Walmart’s Vudu and Apple’s iTunes, M-Go is all about transactional movie sales and rentals — that is, video on demand and electronic sell-through titles.

As it turns out, this effort is to enable DreamWorks to get onto LG smartphones and TVs. We’ll see if it’s worth the effort, especially given that it requires you to buy the content and have an LG phone.

Futurama‘s David X. Cohen on the trials and errors of love, comedy, and science

AVC:It sounds as if there was an element of trial-and-error to the evolution of the series.

DXC: Yeah. Early on, we were sort of fishing around for the tone of the show. In the beginning, it was much lighter, and as it went along and the crazy time travel proved to be one of our most popular episodes, we just embraced it. Comedy sci-fi is a very thin genre; there’s not a lot of it you can point to. There wasn’t a lot of experimentation done to find out what works, at least that I’m aware of. There’s Spaceballs, there’s some funny sci-fi things that I like, like Stanislaw Lem, who has written some hilarious stuff. But I don’t know of a lot of comedy sci-fi. So we were experimenting, and just honoring the sci-fi proved to be our most successful path.

This quite amusing and rather informative post by Adrienne LaFrance over on Salon delves into the protrayals of media in Futurama throughout the series’ run. While there is obviously a lot of fun poked, the creators weren’t shy about mashing up the old and new all in the name of comedy.

Sean Connery’s final film heading to just three cinemas, then DVD

This piece from the Guardian on Sir Billi is pretty much describes about as much about this film as you could ever need to know. Worth a read to learn from other’s mistakes.

KOKO The Blue

While I often discuss crowdsourcing campaigns, I [very] rarely explicitly endorse one. KOKO the Blue is an exception however. Charles Brubaker is a very talented individual and his project (from what I’ve seen) is something I would produce myself given the resources. However, that isn’t the case (yet) so head on over to Indiegogo and pledge your support.

Why Do the Japanese Draw Themselves as White?

This is actually something that I was curious about myself, so it was nice to see a thorough explanation by Julian Abagond over at The Society Pages pop up on my radar even though the post is a few years old:

Why do the Japanese draw themselves as white? You see that especially in manga and anime.

As it turns out, that is an American opinion, not a Japanese one. The Japanese see anime characters as being Japanese. It is Americans who think they are white. Why? Because to them white is the Default Human Being.

The answer wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but then I went away from the article having learned something valuable.

Tweets of the Week

One of my professors suggested that I intern at a studio…. that produced FoodFight